is to suffer extreme torment forever and ever;
to suffer it day and night, from one day to another, from one year to
another, from one age to another, from one thousand ages to another, and
so, adding age to age, and thousands to thousands, in pain, in wailing
and lamenting, groaning and shrieking, and gnashing your teeth; with
your souls full of dreadful grief and amazement, with your bodies and
every member full of racking torture, without any possibility of
getting ease; without any possibility of moving God to pity by your
cries; without any possibility of hiding yourselves from him.... How
dismal will it be, when you are under these racking torments, to know
assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have no
hope; when you shall wish that you might but be turned into nothing, but
shall have no hope of it; when you shall wish that you might be turned
into a toad or a serpent, but shall have no hope of it; when you would
rejoice, if you might but have any relief, after you shall have endured
these torments millions of ages, but shall have no hope of it; when
after you shall have worn out the age of the sun, moon, and stars, in
your dolorous groans and lamentations, without any rest day or night,
when after you shall have worn out a thousand more such ages, yet you
shall have no hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer to
the end of your torments; but that still there are the same groans, the
same shrieks, the same doleful cries, incessantly to be made by you, and
that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend up, forever and ever;
and that your souls, which shall have been agitated with the wrath of
God all this while, yet will still exist to bear more wrath; your
bodies, which shall have been burning and roasting all this while in
these glowing flames, yet shall not have been consumed, but will remain
to roast through an eternity yet, which will not have been at all
shortened by what shall have been past."

When we remember that to the Puritan man, woman, or child the message of
the preacher meant the message of God, we may imagine what effect such
words had on a colonial congregation. To the overwrought nerves of many
a Puritan woman, taught to believe meekly the doctrines of her father,
and weakened in body by ceaseless childbearing and unending toil, such a
picture must indeed have been terrifying. And the God that she and her
husband heard described Sabbath after Sabbath was